The sage of Brewster, John Hay, was writing in 2004 about the late 1940s, but how far have we come?

“The small towns on the Cape did not necessarily welcome each other,” he observes in Mind the Gap. “They had a history of independence and found it difficult to plan together. Rivalry was more common than unity. That gave the towns a certain distinction, an identity of their own, which they could not easily part with.”